Boys and their toys play new beat

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Play time ... Nick Wishart rewires the circuits in electronic toys
to create his own brand of chaotic music.Photo: Jennifer Soo

While most men his age are fiddling with cars, mowers or
electric drills, Nick Wishart, 40, spends his time playing with
dolls.

"Barbie's got a new karaoke guitar, which is great. The riffs in
it are really great and you can sing along to Britney Spears
songs," he said. "Anyone can pick this up and be a guitar
hero."

Wishart is a member of Sydney band Toydeath, who rewire the
circuits in electronic toys to create their own mindbending brand
of chaotic music. Toys are their only instruments and Wishart has
become an expert in manipulating drum-beating bunnies, talking
spelling aids and tiny pianos.

"Educational toys have a really wide variety of noises already
and when you start bending them, you find a really big palette of
sounds," he said. The group source multilingual toys from China and
Japan.

"There's also Super Talk Barbie who can say 100,000 sentences.
It's great when the battery runs down - she turns into Satan."

Now Wishart is teaching his skills to students, hosting a
workshop this weekend on circuit bending. "Circuit bending is
taking an existing circuit and adding to it, twisting it, tweaking
it so that it makes the circuit go somewhere else," he said.

Changing a resistor in a circuit can make a doll speak faster or
slower or scramble a musical calculator. "You don't need to be an
electronics expert - a lot of it is a mystery to me. It's about
going into an unknown world and just poking around."

Electronic art and music are booming genres, but computers
dominate the field. Circuit bending uses more old-fashioned tools:
a soldering iron and a steady pair of hands.

Wishart said: "In the workshops, we'll build a doorbell and
tweak it so it's making really amazing crunchy noisy sounds and
people are saying, 'I've been trying to make my computer do this
for years'."